Social Science and Public Policy

Richard Freeman

Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the making of knowledge about governance itself. We are interested in the means by which those who govern and those who engage with them come to know what they do: we seek to identify and explore the devices with which they work and the processes and practices and by which they establish and expand particular models and techniques. Drawing on work on governmentality, in interpretive policy studies and in science and technology studies we explain just how we might identify, problematize and investigate the elements of 'knowing governance'. We outline the set of case studies collected here, and conclude by pointing to more general questions of reification and reflexivity raised by our work.

The literature on the role of knowledge in policy making encompasses a striking diversity of views on just what knowledge is, what different types of knowledge there may be and how they are to be observed empirically. In this paper, we propose a new phenomenology of knowledge based not on 'who knows what, how and why' but on the form that knowledge takes. Drawing a simple analogy with the three phases of matter - solid, liquid and gas - we argue that knowledge too exists in three phases, which we characterise as embodied, inscribed and enacted. And just as matter may pass from one phase to another, so too knowledge moves and is transformed, through various kinds of action, between phases. We conclude by discussing some of the implications of our perspective for future work, both in research and policy.

As a knowledge-based international agency, WHO offers a useful opportunity to explore the nature of knowledge in policy making. Between 12 and 15 January 2005, a WHO Ministerial Conference on Mental Health in Europe took place in Helsinki: the Declaration and Action Plan it approved quickly became a touchstone for subsequent developments in mental health policy in Europe. Our discussion sets out just how embodied, inscribed and enacted knowledges are deployed in the production, development and dissemination of a policy initiative.

We sum up this volume by restating our initial ambition, which was to develop a framework for investigation rather than to formulate any specific theory. We turn to each element of our model - embodied, inscribed, enacted - in turn, and consider what we have learned from their application and elaboration in the case studies collected here. We identify the implications of our work both for research design and method and for practice, and close by reflecting more abstractly on the relationship between knowledge and policy.

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? What unacknowledged assumptions do we hold? This Introduction argues that, for a long time, EU studies has been dominated by discussions in which ‘the EU’ is consistently treated as an object: supranational, intergovernmental, multi-level, monotopia. Yet, theoretical debates over which image is ‘correct’, although important, are nonetheless camouflaging a more fundamental divide about how we can and should imagine Europe. And this is an ontological divide. Indeed, we argue that it is only through identifying this ontological divide that scholarship is enabled – if it so desires – to move away from imagining Europe as an object and think of Europe differently. We explain why we focus on ontology and set out our own starting point. Critically, rather than beginning by assuming the EU to be supranational or intergovernmental or some hybrid organisation, we instead start out by making inclusive assumptions about its causal structures. These are process-orientated, collectivist and interpretivist assumptions enabling us to re-imagine Europe as a space of action. We elaborate our concept of space –physical, symbolic, peopled, bordered, multiple and routinised – and ask where are these spaces of Europe and what goes on in them?

Regulation depends fundamentally upon the production and dissemination of knowledge. At a minimum, one might imagine a mechanical model of regulation which involves regulator A exerting control over the actions of actor B. But even here, knowledge is crucial, for B must know what kinds of actions A requires or considers appropriate if regulation is to occur. And A must ensure that its preferences are communicated effectively, in a form that B can comprehend and act upon.
In real world situations, the knowledge problems associated with regulation are of course much more complex than this. Regulators need to have knowledge of the domain they are regulating, including the aims, interests and capacities of the various actors who inhabit that domain. Actors need to know how the regulators’ communications are to be interpreted, and what penalties they might face if they act incorrectly. And regulators and actors alike need to constantly update their knowledge of the system as a whole, and of how effectively regulation might be working to ensure that their interests are fulfilled. Regulation, in short, depends on the constant generation, circulation, interpretation and evaluation of knowledge.
This chapter duly reports and discusses the findings of a study of the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) in defining the content of mental health policy in Europe.

What is policy? How do we do or make policy? Where and who with? What is it for, anyway, and what difference does it make? Good questions, though you wouldn't be asking them if you didn't already know that answering them isn't easy. You've read and heard a lot of stuff which seems to be called 'policy', and some other stuff which seems to be about 'the policy process', and you still have these questions. Forgive me, then, for wondering whether questions and answers are going to take us very far. I'd really like to know why you're asking, because then I think we'd get into conversation. Because we've never met, I'm going to have to imagine what you'd say and what I'd say in return. So what follows here is an imagined and implied conversation, in which you tell me the story of your first foray into policy making and I try to make sense of it...

Publication Type: chapter in book Source: Global Mental Heath: Trauma and Recovery, A companion guide for field and clinical care of traumatized people worldwide, Cambridge MA: Harvard Program in Refugee TraumaDate: 2011 Link: http://hprt-cambridge.org/?page_id=641

IntroductionFreeman R and Rowe, M

We are concerned here with community psychiatry, a particular way of knowing and thinking about mental illness and of responding to it. Community psychiatry, for our purposes, refers to all the policies, services, agencies and staff deployed in treating people with mental health problems who are poor and for whom publicly-funded services are the default, if not the only, option. Community psychiatry is public psychiatry. Our first purpose is educational, to set out for ourselves and others what community psychiatry is and has been, where it has come from, and where it might go. Our immediate aim is to explain how we think of community psychiatry, why we began this project, and how we set about it.

This paper reviews comparative research on health policy in OECD countries, outlining the origins and development of health policy in the modern state and pointing to the different ways that development has been understood by welfare state scholars. We describe different standard forms of health system, discussing the ways health care is paid for, provided and regulated in advanced industrial countries, and comment on the emergence of a new domain of international and global health.

Health policy is as modern as social democracy. This is not to suggest that social democracy is some sort of 'cause' of health policy, but that their environments – political, economic, demographic, social and ideological – are shared. Underpinning all of these is a common, modern epistemology, which frames the causes and effects of social problems and the capacities of government in specific ways. This paper begins by outlining the conditions under which, historically, health policy has been made, in Scotland as elsewhere in Europe. It goes on to review health policy in Scotland since 1997 and finds much to confirm a social democratic model of government. But it also identifies elements of unease and uncertainty about what might be achieved, and how. It describes a new, emergent body of theory and practice in Scottish public health derived from an appreciation of complex systems. It points, too, to the widely-regarded work of the Millan Commission and the transformation of mental health legislation it set in train. Each provides indications of the ways in which both health and government might be renewed, and in which social democracy might be redefined.

Relationships between states and citizens are defined at least in part through respective obligations and entitlements to welfare. Harold Lasswell's 'Who gets what, when, how' is as good a definition of welfare as of politics: welfare is both source and target of a high proportion of political conflict in advanced industrial societies. For this reason, the study of welfare is an effective way in which the nature of political participation, as well as its changing form and extent, may be analysed and assessed. This chapter discusses different kinds of participation in welfare policy and provision, illustrated with examples from a variety of countries.